10 Ridiculously Hellish Suburbs in Movies

This week, Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne have their new lives in the suburbs upended by a rowdy fraternity led by antagonistic Zac Efron in Neighbors. It's far from the first time that films have presented small residential communities outside the city as battlegrounds, or places of intolerance, or locales defined by inhabitants' quiet suffering and misery. Far from the white-picket-fence nirvana they seemed to represent during the first half of the twentieth century, these films have increasingly — and, it must said, sometimes laughably — portrayed the suburbs as rife with discontent and conflict, where the happily-ever-after promises of the American Dream are revealed to be shams. Whether an environment where different types uneasily coexist, or a milieu where cheery facades mask corrosive, deeply rooted torment and twisted urges and anxieties, the suburbs have long been a target of both comedies and dramas. In honor of their latest cinematic censure, we present ten extreme movie depictions — some great, some lousy, some hilarious — of suburban hell.

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American Beauty

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Sam Mendes's 1999 Oscar winner presented the suburbs as a hotbed of personal, marital, and social dysfunction. Led by over-the-top performances from Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening as an unhappy couple struggling to cope with issues of beauty, materialism, love, and liberation, it's the overpraised film that summed up suburban malaise — and the desire to escape it, by feeling something real — via the image of a floating plastic bag.

Arlington Road

A thriller summed up by its tagline — "Fear Thy Neighbor" — 1999's Arlington Road is an entertainingly panic-stricken film about a George Washington University professor (Jeff Bridges) who comes to suspect that the new couple on the block (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) are, in fact, nefarious terrorists. Fifteen years later, its tone is still ludicrous, even as its paranoia has proven somewhat prescient.

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Little Children

An out-and-out hysterical vision of suburban nightmarishness, 2006's Little Children posits its setting as not just a breeding ground for personal ennui, marital frustrations, and barely sustained nastiness and prejudice, but also for — given all the nice, little kids around — pedophilia! Run for your lives, narrow-minded swimming pool patrons!

The 'Burbs

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An undervalued comedy gem that plays off of — and skewers — criticisms of the suburbs, Joe Dante's 1989 The 'Burbs concerns Tom Hanks's everyman, who slowly becomes convinced that his neighbors are up to no good. Featuring a great supporting turn by Bruce Dern, it's a saga full of craziness (and crazies) that digs into the darker underbelly of suburbia with tongue-in-cheek absurdity.

Blue Velvet

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David Lynch's masterpiece of suburban deviance and dread, 1986's Blue Velvet paints an ominously surreal picture of small-town USA as rife with rot and corruption. A mystery that's instigated by a college student's (Kyle MacLachlan) discovery of a human ear, Lynch's film is a weird, wild work, and one that turned Dennis Hopper's beer preference into a rallying cry against middle-class pretensions.

The Ice Storm

An alternately amusing, heartbreaking, and cartoonish portrait of '70s Connecticut restlessness and despair, Ang Lee's The Ice Storm came to epitomize modern cinema's outlook on the suburbs as a place filled with aloof and two-timing parents, desolate kids, and lots of oh-so-wacky neighbors, all of them living under a shared umbrella of dissatisfaction.

Revolutionary Road

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Apparently convinced that American Beauty hadn't properly hammered home his point about the American suburbs, British director Sam Mendes revisisted the subject to even more leaden, exaggerated results with 2008's Revolutionary Road, an adaptation of Richard Yates's novel that proffers clichés about the suburbs — that they crush the soul, stamp out romantic and sexual excitement, and help people hide from their own inadequacies and failings — with a sincerity, and operatic self-importance, that's unintentionally riotous.

The Stepford Wives

An update of the 1972 thriller, 2004's The Stepford Wives takes good-natured satiric jabs at the suburbs as a land populated by robot Aryan women cut from the same blonde-and-beautiful Barbie cloth. A cheeky ode to the evil of cookie-cutter conformity (and the sexism and racism that it breeds), it gets considerable mileage from a pitch-perfect plastic performance by Nicole Kidman.

Poltergeist

Suburban domesticity comes under attack from supernatural forces in Tobe Hooper's stellar 1982 Poltergeist — a film that not only memorably imagines affluent possessions as sources of lethal danger (don't go near that TV, little girl!), but eventually blames its otherworldly phenomenon on the fact that the suburbs were callously built upon Native American burial grounds.

Happiness

Todd Solondz pushed suburban critiques to their controversial breaking point with Happiness, a 1998 film made notorious by its subplot involving an ordinary family man (Dylan Baker) who, it turns out, also happens to be a pedophile. A carnivalesque parody of suburban normalcy, the director's polarizing early effort is chilling, hilarious, and puerile in equal measure.